﻿FESTIVAL SPECIAL﻿﻿Double Bill﻿﻿"Yojimbo"﻿ & ﻿"A Fistful of Dollars"﻿

"Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune team up for one of their most basic and enjoyable samurai films"" The explosive outbursts of violence in Yojimbo are superbly choreographed, with Kurosawa's customary use of a telephoto lens creating a hallucinatory feeling."

﻿Yojimbo is a 1961 period drama film directed by Akira Kurosawa. It tells the story of a ronin, portrayed by Toshiro Mifune, who arrives in a small town where competing crime lords vie for supremacy. The two bosses each try to hire the deadly newcomer as a bodyguard (yojimbo in Japanese).Kurosawa stated that a major source for the plot was the 1942 film noir classic The Glass Key, an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 1931 novel. It has been noted that the overall plot of Yojimbo is closer to that of another Hammett novel, Red Harvest (1929). Kurosawa scholar David Desser, and film critic Manny Farber claim that Red Harvest was the inspiration for the film; however, Donald Richie and other scholars believe the similarities are coincidental. When asked his name, the samurai calls himself "Kuwabatake Sanjuro" (meaning "mulberry field thirty-year-old"), which he seems to make up while looking at a mulberry field by the town. Thus, the character can be viewed as an early example of the "Man with No Name" (other examples of which appear in a number of earlier novels, including Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest).Yojimbo ranked at #95 in Empire magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Films of All Time.In 1964, Yojimbo was remade as A Fistful of Dollars, a spaghetti western directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood in his first appearance as the Man with No Name. Leone and his production company failed to secure the remake rights to Kurosawa's film, resulting in a lawsuit that delayed Fistful's release in North America for three years. In Yojimbo, the protagonist defeats a man who carries a gun, while he carries only a knife and a sword; in the equivalent scene in Fistful, Eastwood's pistol-wielding character survives being shot by a rifle by hiding an iron plate under his clothes to serve as a shield against bullets.﻿

﻿"From Clint Eastwood's iconic performance to Ennio Morricone's unforgettable (and much-parodied) musical score, A Fistful of Dollars took the western down trails it had never explored."

"A clever film, shot with sophistication, which ... propelled Eastwood to international stardom.""A wonderful cinematic experience.""It's Leone's shortest and simplest film, but all of his hallmarks -- a
masterly use of space within the widescreen frame, Ennio Morricone's
unusual soundtrack music, plenty of silence -- are already in place."﻿

﻿Fistful of Dollars was at first intended by Leone to reinvent the western genre in Italy. In his opinion, the American westerns of the mid- to late-1950s had become stagnant, overly-preachy and unbelievable, and, because of this, Hollywood began to gear down production of such films. Leone knew that there was still a significant market in Europe for westerns yet observed that Italian audiences were beginning to laugh at the stock conventions of both American westerns and the pastiche work of Italian directors working behind pseudonyms. His approach was to take the grammar of the Italian film and transpose it into a western setting.Fistful of Dollars became the first film to exhibit Leone's famously distinctive style of visual direction. This was influenced by both John Ford's cinematic landscaping and the Japanese method of direction, perfected by Akira Kurosawa. Leone wanted an operatic feel to his western and so there are many examples of extreme close-ups on the faces of different characters that function like the arias in a traditional opera. They focus the attention on a single person and that countenance becomes both the landscape and dialogue of the scene. This is quite different from the Hollywood use of faces where the close-up was treated as a reaction shot, usually to a piece of dialogue that had just been spoken. Leone's close-ups are more akin to portraits, often lit with Renaissance-type lighting effects and are pieces of design in their own right.Advertised as "This is the first film of its kind. It won't be the last," the film was effectively an unofficial and unlicensed remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1961 film Yojimbo (written by Kurosawa and Ryuzo Kikushima), lifting themes and character types from that samurai film. Kurosawa insisted that Leone had made "a fine movie, but it was MY movie." Leone ignored the resulting lawsuit, but eventually settled out of court, reportedly for 15% of the worldwide receipts of A Fistful of Dollars and over $100,000. British critic Sir Christopher Frayling identifies three principal sources for Fistful of Dollars: "Partly derived from Kurosawa's samurai film Yojimbo, partly from Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest (1929), but most of all from Carlo Goldoni's eighteenth-century play Servant of Two Masters." Leone has cited these alternate sources in his defense. He claims a thematic debt, for both Fistful and Yojimbo, to Carlo Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters—the basic premise of the protagonist playing two camps against each other. Leone asserted that this rooted the origination of Fistful/Yojimbo in European, and specifically Italian, culture. The Servant of Two Masters plot can also be seen in Hammett's detective novel Red Harvest. Leone himself believed that Red Harvest had influenced Yojimbo: "Kurosawa's Yojimbo was inspired by an American novel of the serie-noire so I was really taking the story back home again." Leone also referenced numerous American Westerns in the film, most notably Shane (1953) and My Darling Clementine (1946).﻿